Infamous grey-market key seller G2A was in the news again this week after indie developers pleaded with gamers not to buy from the shady store. In fact, they’d rather have gamers pirate their catalog instead, being that G2A gives nothing back to creators and continues to damage the indie industry.
Please, if you’re going to buy a game from G2A, just pirate it instead! Genuinely!
— Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) June 30, 2019
Devs don’t see a penny either way, so we’d much rather G2A didn’t see money either
No More Robots’ Mike Rose set up a petition requesting G2A to stop selling keys for indie titles after the company revealed that these titles comprise only 8% of their sales. The store has been accused time and time again of selling stolen goods, which it has countered with private audits. The company says it’ll do so again, going as far as paying developers “10 times the money they lost on chargebacks after their illegally obtained keys were sold on G2A.”
G2A asserts that it works with developers to remove keys that devs believe shouldn’t be on its marketplace, and says that it offers a program called G2A Direct that allows devs to get a cut of third-party sales made on its platform. Beyond that, it says that only 8 percent of the games sold on G2A are indie titles to begin with.
A portion of the post covers the common belief that G2A facilitates the resale of keys obtained through credit card fraud. That method sees individual key resellers using stolen credit card information to purchase games, reselling the keys, and then leaving developers on the hook for refunds once the fraud is discovered and a chargeback is ordered.